Fighting Virtual Hate
A petition circulating on Change.org is calling for Twitter to adopt a “report abuse” button. After Caroline Criado-Perez successfully campaigned for Jane Austen to be featured on Britain’s 10-pound note, she began to receive an onslaught of rape and death threats via Twitter. Now, over 60,000 people have signed the petition, calling for Twitter to take stronger measures against online hate.
UK
After the murder of 75 year-old Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham, people came together for a vigil. Credit: ITV.
On June 4, a mosque and Islamic cultural center in Muswell Hill, North London was burned to the ground. The letters ‘EDL’, the acronym of the anti-Muslim group English Defense League, were found graffitied on a nearby wall. Hours after the news broke, EDL members took to Facebook with comments such as “Burn them all”, “love it!!” and “shoulda been full.”
This is the second article in a series on hate crime in the UK. Read the first article, “Making Victim Reporting Accessible,” here.
This is the first in a series on hate crime in the UK.
This month marks the 20th anniversary of the high-profile murder of Stephen Lawrence, a young black man who was killed by a group of white men chanting racist slogans while he was waiting for the bus in London.
Since her son’s murder in 1993, Doreen Lawrence has campaigned for better
community policing and increased opportunities for black and minority ethnic youth in Britain. CREDIT: The Guardian
At the time of Lawrence’s murder in 1993, hate crime laws did not exist in the UK, but by the time the case was tried in 2011 his kilIlers were given sentence enhancements for racial bias, and religion, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity had also been recognized as protected categories under British law.